Potter

Qualla Boundary (Cherokee), NC

"I was about six or seven when I started doing pottery," Louise Bigmeat Maney said. "When I was a girl growing up, we used to dig our own clay up here near the Macedonia church on the creek bank." She recalled that her older brother "had a sled and a steer, and he'd haul the clay home. And then we'd lay it out on the ground and spread it out and let it dry." After cleaning the clay, they used an old meat grinder to grind it up.

Moses H. Cone Memorial Park, near Blowing Rock, North Carolina on the Blue Ridge Parkway, preserves the country estate of Moses Cone, a prosperous textile entrepreneur, conservationist, and philanthropist of the Gilded Age. Its centerpiece is Flat Top Manor, a gleaming white 20-room, 13,000 square foot mansion built in 1901 in the grand Colonial Revival style.